Maria Kefalas2015-03-31T14:44:29-04:00Maria Kefalashttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=maria-kefalasCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Maria KefalasGood old fashioned elbow grease.What Does the Mother of a Dying Child Do to Celebrate a Birthday?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.43933732013-12-09T13:29:14-05:002014-02-08T05:59:01-05:00Maria Kefalashttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/maria-kefalas/
My daughter, Calliope Joy, called Cal by our family, has metachromatic leukodystrophy, a neurological disease that has robbed her of the ability to walk, speak or feed herself. Most people have only encountered this disease through the film Lorenzo's Oil. Lorenzo Odone suffered from adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), a cousin of my daughter's illness. Unlike the film's Hollywood ending suggests, the Odones didn't find a miracle oil to cure any form of leukodystrophy.

Eighteen months after diagnosis, my daughter, a child nicknamed "Happy Feet" because she was in constant motion, now receives hospice care and cannot hold up her head, sit up, use the toilet, communicate, and she struggles to swallow. The doctors at the world's finest children's hospital have no hope to offer. It is a disease so cruel it makes me envy children with brain tumors.

Needless to say, when your little girl can't sing, play, eat cake or open presents, how can you celebrate her birthday? You are not in the mood to send out cheerful invitations or hire a magician. Some alternatives include crying all day, self-medicating with wine or prescription drugs, wailing, pulling your hair out or pretending as best as you can that everything is normal and baking a cake and getting some balloons. I have tried them all.

This year, I will try a different approach: selling cupcakes.

My son gave me the idea. When he saw how successful our first fundraiser for The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, an event called Cal's Cupcake Challenge (a more kid-friendly take on the show "Cupcake Wars"), was, he asked if we sold a million cupcakes, would that be enough to find a cure for his sister's disease?

Photo: Julie Conti

I told him I wasn't sure if a million cupcakes would do the trick, but it was a great place to start. After all, $50,000 buys 1,000 hours of medical research.

So, my key coping strategy for this birthday will be to sell as many cupcakes as possible to raise money for and awareness of kids with neurological disease.

Cupcakes make people smile and they taste delicious. And the cupcakes make it easier for people to listen to our sad story and hear that 20 million American children have some sort of neurological disorder (ranging from autism to epilepsy). Precious few of these diseases have any meaningful treatments or therapies, and not a single one has a cure.

So, for my daughter's birthday, I will work to help other children when my child can't be saved.

Secretly, I fantasize about how my cupcake sales might change the world. Grief has caused a sort of mania. I want to believe our tragedy has granted me superhuman powers; it feeds this grandiose notion that my daughter's suffering has to mean something. For all that will be lost for her and us, there must be something worthwhile that comes out of this. Nothing I do in her name will ever make up for her suffering and death. Yet, I know I have to do something. And so, this conviction forces me to get up each day and pushes me to talk to doctors, lecture to medical students, write politicians and sit around in parking lots and sell cupcakes.

Photo: Caryn Schwartberg

And you might be surprised to learn that in the midst of this nightmare, I have discovered so much beauty in the generosity of friends and the support of neighbors.

So many people with sick children hide. I do not. I share my girl and this story with anyone who is willing to listen. I have to say that being out there and doing something is much better than staying home and feeling sorry for her and for myself.

By being out in the world, there is joy and connection and love and meaning to be found.

Cal receives letters, cards and books created by children touched by her story, wishing her well and hoping the doctors can find a cure. When Cal goes to visit with children at her older brother's school, kids don't turn away the way their parents do. The children are brave and loving in the purest way, and they touch my daughter's curly hair and say how pretty she is and ask questions about her disease and her. They want to know if they can be her friend.

By being out in the world, I found an extraordinary artist who gave me a wonderful gift last year by doing my daughter's portrait. The artist took special care to capture the light in Cal's eyes, since the painter understood that as my daughter becomes blind, her gaze would be more unfocused and distant. Each morning, after I settle my daughter with her nurses when she gets fed and dressed, I stare at the lovely painting of my daughter and dream of how she will always be -- for me -- despite what this disease has taken.

But, I won't lie, trying to get through another birthday and be brave won't be easy.

In my melancholy moments, I rage about how there is nothing to celebrate this year except that my daughter doesn't need a feeding tube and that there have been no grand mal seizures yet. It's hard not to be angry and bitter when people ask, "So, what are you doing for your daughter's birthday?"

So, for now, I will keep writing and selling cupcakes.

And maybe, if I am really lucky, one day, some of the money earned from the cupcakes, t-shirts and cupcake-themed merchandise will be part of the research project that makes the breakthrough in epilepsy or autism that we have been waiting for for decades.

In the future, I dream, the doctors who diagnosed my daughter will call me to meet the 4-year-old child that they have saved from my daughter's fate.

And I will touch this child's hair and gaze into her eyes, and ask her mother what they are doing to celebrate her birthday. And this mother won't weep at the thought of birthdays or need to sell cupcakes to feel better.

This will never make up for losing my daughter, but it will have to do.

]]>Some Musings on Labor Daytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.2810702009-09-09T15:45:53-04:002011-05-25T14:00:22-04:00Maria Kefalashttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/maria-kefalas/This Labor Day, with the nation's unemployment rate closing in on 10 percent, the highest level it has been since Ronald Reagan was president, "celebrating the contributions of American workers to the nation's prosperity" sounds about as appealing as drinking a steaming mug of hot chocolate in 95-degree heat.

And though every segment of the economy has been touched by
what's going on, working-class jobs for workers without college degrees, especially those in manufacturing,
have been taking the biggest hits: 136,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared
in a single month, from May to June of this year, and since the recession
started, the nation shed 1.9 million manufacturing jobs. Outsourcing and
automation put downward pressures on the demand for blue-collar labor
during the best of times. However, in the wake of this historic slow-down,
positions that have been absorbed by other workers or taken over by
computer robotic systems are never coming back.

Next time you pick up groceries, take note of how many of the supermarket cashiers have been
replaced by self-checkout stations, or how, when you call your doctor's
office, there's an automated message system instead of a medical
secretary getting you a prescription or test results. Experts warn that
when this recession ends, we will most likely have yet another jobless
recovery, a term that described this distinctively post-industrial phenomenon of economic growth that comes without firms hiring workers.

During recessions, the media pays most of its attention to the hardships of middle-aged workers getting laid off. The reality is that young workers struggle the most in an economic slowdown and face higher unemployment rates than the population as a whole. While 45 to 55 year olds have a lower jobless rate than the rest of the country, 6.8 percent, 25 to 34 year olds, the largest segment of the labor force, face a 10.5 percent unemployment rate, experienced the greatest number of job losses since May 2008 (4.5 million) and remain the most likely to be underemployed (more than 2 million hold part-time jobs when they want to work full-time). The news for the youngest workers is actually worse: 15. 2 percent of 20- to 24-olds and 24 percent of teenagers are out of work and seeking jobs.

New York Times journalist Steve
Greenhouse calls the young people joining the labor force during this historic
recession "Generation R." But the challenges facing kids with high diplomas trying to find work
in a high-tech, globalized economy, started long before this economic crisis.
For decades, politicians and social scientists have been talking about
the knowledge economy and the threat posed by globalization. And yet, far too
high school grads were entering the labor force and expecting to achieve
some variation of a middle-class lifestyle with jobs at Ford or building McMansions.

It's not fair to put this on kids.

The nation's chronic underinvestment in young workers not headed to
four-year college programs, which has been a silent, creeping problem for
decades, now threatens to transform huge numbers of Generation R trapped in a new underclass.

According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education's
report card: "The US ranks 15th of 29 developed nations in terms of
degrees granted: For every 100 students enrolled, countries such as
Switzerland, Japan, and Australia award 26 degrees, compared with 18" in
this country. So while the much of the developed world assumes that every
student earning the equivalent of high school diploma will be bilingual
and rushes to prepare their graduates for a global economy where
knowledge of computers, medicine, finance, and engineering will win the
day: millions of American youngsters enter the labor force not knowing how to read an Excel spread sheet oruse a computer for anything but iTunes. Too many young Americans still believe having a strong back and work ethic will take care of them. They are playing by 20th rules in a 21st century economy.

Let us pray that the brutal realities of what many people are calling the great
recession will wake up complacent, parents, teachers, business civic and
leaders, and young people to the dangers of believing in the 1950's version of the American Dream.

During the Great Depression, high school graduation rates increased when young people could not find jobs. Maybe the silver lining for Generation R is that they too will start to commit to higher education. The Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation has called for a
national initiative to get everyone to college.This is commendable, the
problem is, not every young person, will or even wants to follow this
path. And, though everyone recognizes that more Americans need to get to
college, our notion of college should not be limited by the selective,
ivy covered ones. A far more pragmatic, and efficient, use of
resources is to map young people's eagerness to enter the labor force
onto realistic training, for two or three years that would not cost hundreds
of thousands of dollars.

In all the talk of stimulus packages out there, for the auto industry, Wall Street, and
the housing market, we should take this Labor Day
to reflect on what we can do for our young people who are eager to
work but who have been betrayed. It was a mistake to assume that they would find a job and just be okay, somehow. It''s time to start paying attention.

]]>How Can the Richest Country in the World Deal With the Issue of Teen Pregnancy?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.826572008-01-22T11:37:00-05:002011-05-25T12:20:21-04:00Maria Kefalashttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/maria-kefalas/
The rather sobering news about a rise in pregnancy rates among teenagers
for the first time since 1991 seems to have re-awakened Americans' fears
over the problem of early childbearing. According to the sociologist
Frank Furstenberg, who has studied teenage pregnancy for four decades and
recently published a book on the topic called Destinies of the
Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teen Childbearing, this latest panic
reflects the nation's dogged denial about the role of sexuality in
adolescence.

Anyone who understands the basics of the birds and the bees knows what
will happen when boys and girls engage in unprotected sex. According to
Furstenberg, a father and grandfather himself, Americans suffer from a
puzzling wonderment when it comes to our young people and their developing
sexuality. In his book, Furstenberg offers a metaphor of driving to
describe the problem with the current view. When we prepare our young to
get behind a wheel at 15- or 16-years-old: there is intensive instruction,
careful monitoring, and, eventually, a time where young people get to
drive a car on their own, Furstenberg says. Driving is, potentially, a
far more dangerous than having sex. And yet, as Furstenberg sees it, under
the current strategy, parents rail against the inevitability of young
people's sexuality by refusing to accept it as "normal and normative." He
says, "it is as if we stand back and watch young people go out on the road
without any preparation," telling them simply: "try not to hit anything."
Such schizophrenic messages also gets reinforced in abstinence plus sexual
education programs where teenagers are advised "not to have sex," with the
proviso "to use protection if they do." Statistical trends in young
people's sexual behavior foreshadowed this increase in teen pregnancy,
since 2003, contraceptive use among adolescents actually declined while
the levels of sexual activity have remained constant.

Within the issue of teenage pregnancy is the unspoken sense that abortion
offers a way out. With more than a million abortions annually, and 50
percent of teenage pregnancies ending in pregnancy termination, the choice
to go to term and become a mother, or not, offer the two most common
"solutions" to an unplanned pregnancy for a teenager. And yet, as far as
we can see, these assorted outcomes -- abortion, adoption, or parenthood
-- appear to be powerfully structured by social realities like class, race,
poverty, and education. When a pregnancy occurs for a teenager, the girls
who are poor, not headed to college, were raised by single mothers who
were teen parents themselves, and are not white overwhelmingly opt to keep
the baby and raise a child. Women who choose abortion were raised by two
parents, come from affluent families and graduate from college. In the
end, of the thousands of girls will find themselves pregnant, overwhelmingly, young women with the most options end their pregnancies, while the poorest and most disadvantaged ones become young mothers. It is no accident, after all, that you hardly ever see college students pushing strollers with newborns on campus.

Given the growing social acceptance of young mothers and the legal access to abortion, despite the "happy ending" of the film Juno, the
reality is that adoption is a rarely considered option when pregnancy
happens among teens. A select group women, who are typically white
and socially conservative, will choose this path because of their
opposition to abortion and the fact that there are thousands of families
eager to adopt healthy white infants. Many poor, young women of color
inhabit a social world where early childbearing is common and the
reality of foster care system filled with non-white infants in need of
families convinces them that children raised on public assistance will
be better off than ones trapped in the foster care system. In the
flurry of headlines following the news of Jamie Lynn Spears' impending
motherhood, are we shocked because Ms. Spears had sex with her boyfriend
or that she had sex and failed to use contraception effectively, or that
she did not have an abortion?

So how exactly can the richest country in the world deal with the issue of teen pregnancy? For Furstenberg, the first step is to abandon the
moralistic messages of the don't- have- sex -but-if-you-do-be careful
campaigns. Accept the fact that most young people will have sexual
experiences and prepare them for this future. This does not simply mean
handing out rainbow-colored condoms at schools; this also requires
empowering young men and women to talk about sex with their partners so
they can negotiate boundaries. The subtext of the most effective
programs encourages young people to wait by teaching teenagers to build
sex into healthy, loving, and enduring relationships. Indeed, in the
Netherlands, where sexuality is seen as a natural and expected part of
late adolescence, abortion rates are lower and the age at first sexual
initiation is older than here in the United States where the federal
government calls on teenagers to avoid sex until marriage. When you
look at the rest of the world where teenage childbearing has become a
problem of another time, it is maddening to see policymakers and parents
in the United States so perplexed. After studying teenage childbearing
for 40 years, Furstenberg has to wonder how much longer it will take for
us to realize how "we are doing in the name of protecting our young
people" has been such an abject failure.

]]>

Failure to Launch or Launching Too Soon?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2007:/theblog//3.493532007-05-31T13:00:00-04:002011-05-25T12:05:18-04:00Maria Kefalashttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/maria-kefalas/Failure to Launch, it likely keeps more than a few parents awake at night.

Magazines and newspapers are full of stories about twenty-somethings who can't seem to fly the coop. Self-help books with titles such as The Quarter-Life Crisis promise guidance to young people overwhelmed at the thought of entering the real world.

Yet all the hand-wringing misses a crucial point. The self-focus, exploration, and perceived possibility of this time of life is a luxury reserved for only the most privileged elite for only about one in four 25-year-olds, or just about 27 percent of this age group, earn that all-important college credential which makes the roaring twenty-something years possible.

In contrast to the media portrayals and conventional wisdom which suggest that today's iPod generation can't leave the leave the nest, consider the findings of Penn State researcher Wayne Osgood and his colleagues. They show that many young people continue to follow the traditional route to adulthood that defined the marriage rush and baby boom decade of the 1950s.

"Fast-starters," as Osgood calls them, are the young people with modest educations and modest resources who move into full-time jobs, marriage, and their own place far sooner than their upper-class peers.

However, they do so at a price. Young people progressing at lightning speed into adulthood accomplish this by neglecting schooling. This means fast-starters acquire the markers of adulthood on the fast track, but that they risk getting get trapped between the rock and a hard place of a blue- and pink-collar labor sector where down-sizing, stagnating wages, shrinking worker's benefits, and nonexistent job mobility eat away at their chances of getting ahead. Even marriage is not as stable for this group. Fast-starters might walk down the aisle earlier in life, but their unions are more likely to end in divorce than their college educated peers.

As uncertain as things might be for the fast starters, another group faces an even more questionable future. These disconnected young adults - some estimates put this population at 14 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds - are often neither working, nor going to school, nor active in the military. Many have aged out of foster care, bounced around in homeless shelters and spent time in juvenile detention facilities. They constitute our most vulnerable youth, and without support and intervention, the only road they'll take is probably the one leading to jail, or worse.

In The Culture of Fear, sociologist Barry Glassner wryly observes that Americans are afraid of the wrong things. And so it seems, this might be the case with the latest take on "the problem with young people today." At first glance, the highly educated, so-called millennials might seem slow to get started, but rest assured, this select minority is on target to do almost everything their parents hope and expect for them.

The true "lost generation" is the factory worker who regrets not learning more about computers, the waitress and single mom who even with a full-time job earns too little to permanently leave public assistance, or the married 23-year-old mother working the night-shift at a convenience store, too exhausted to keep up with course work for her teaching degree.

And finally, most distressingly of all, are the steadily swelling ranks of the largely male drop-outs - from high schools, community, and four-year colleges - who lack the capital (human, social, cultural and economic) to lead productive lives.

Perhaps the most important lesson for this commencement season is that we are living in an America that is profoundly unequal, and that the simultaneously harsh and mundane realities of the twenty-first century's global economy mean that a college degree determine who will become a have or have-not. Community colleges show promise as an alternative for young people not destined for a university campus, but they remain an under-used resource in creating trained workers.

We must do far more to reach out to the large numbers of youth trying to navigate this new terrain of early adulthood without the scaffolding affluent families can provide. At the end of the day, the legions of college grads moving back home while they figure out what to do after college is not something to lose sleep over. The growing numbers of young people embarking on adulthood without the education and skills they need to lead engaged and purposeful lives: that should be keeping somebody up at night.
]]>Single Mama Dramatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2007:/theblog//3.480202007-05-09T11:52:06-04:002011-05-25T12:05:18-04:00Maria Kefalashttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/maria-kefalas/
After all, who wants to be 45 when they finally trade in their Diesel jeans for Liz Lange maternity wear? The problem, of course, is that while popular media's version might sell magazines, it has little basis in reality. When I explain that most single moms are not like Miranda from Sex and the City, they are the young women Fantasia Barrino sings about in her hit song "Baby Mama" - the late-twenty and early-thirtysomething reporters always seem so disappointed.

The fact is that family structure diverges drastically by social class in the United States. Since the 1960s, what demographers now call the non-marital birth rate (and what your mother and grandmothers' generations called out-of-wedlock births) skyrocketed among women with a high school education or less. And, despite Dan Quayle's dire predictions, the number of women with college degrees who have children outside of marriage - a la Murphy Brown - has hardly changed in two decades.

Apparently, when professional women hear that biological clock ticking, they still log-on to Match.com before they call up the sperm bank. (See Rosanna Hertz's book Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family for an account of the select group of middle-class women who are part of this phenomena.)

It seems that while young women attending college "hook up," conscientiously contracept, and have an abortion if they find themselves pregnant before they wed, poor young women practice contraception lackadaisically, move from courtship to conception at lightning speed, and become mommies before they become wives. Spend time in the nation's poorest communities, and you will see that many young women bear children by the age of 21, a point in life when their more affluent peers are just celebrating the fact they no longer need to use fake IDs to go clubbing.

Unmarried women, from all socioeconomic backgrounds get pregnant all the time. But the crucial difference is while poor women have a baby, educated women do not. So, once and for all, let's get the facts straight: even though one in three American children are born to unmarried parents, you won't see single moms pushing their bugaboos in the posh suburbs or on college campuses.

Among the poor women fueling the non-marital birth trend, the right thing to do is to greet a less than perfectly planned pregnancy with the determination to rise to the challenge. Terminating a pregnancy merely to advance their education or career is selfish at best, immoral at worst.

While my college students won't have their first child for a decade a more, for the young single moms I came to know in Philadelphia, their early twenties seems like a fine time to start a family. As Linda, a poor, African American mother explained: "Wait till you're 30 or 40 [to have children]. I don't think so."

College-bound young women typically see having a baby before finishing school and establishing a career as an unmitigated disaster. Economists back up this view with the prediction that a college-educated woman who bears a child before age 25 will experience a severe reduction to her overall lifetime earnings. In striking contrast, economists have also shown that a poor woman's prospects aren't any better when she waits until her mid-twenties to have her children. (Geronimous, Arlene and Sanders Korenmann. 2002. "The Socioeconomic Consequences of Teen Childbearing Reconsidered." Quarterly Journal of Economics 107: 1187-1214.) After all, for a woman with a high school diploma, the $7-an-hour job she can land at 18 is the same $7-an-hour job she'll be holding at 28.

You are now wondering: Don't these young women know they and their children be better off if they waited? Their response to you would be: Waiting for what? The stylish careers, fulfilling relationships, and exceptional educations that will occupy middle- and upper class women's twenties and thirties are unattainable dreams to the women driving the non-marital childbearing trend. They would insist, why should they risk missing out on the chance to do the best and most important thing a woman can do with her life by waiting for a marriage and the better circumstances that are not likely to happen?

Ultimately, when young women coming of age in America's poorest communities can claim the hope and opportunity their more privileged sisters take as their birthright, becoming a mother will cease being the best and most meaningful thing a poor, young woman can do with her life. So, despite what the magazines might be telling us, non-marital childbearing is not a fashion trend - it is a social phenomenon reflecting a growing chasm between society's haves and the have-nots. Divisions that are so deep and profound in our society that they have spilled into the intimate world of the family.

So, in the meantime, when you see the glossy magazine covers about the latest crop of celebrity single moms, try to remember the real story about the women living out the single mama drama. ]]>It's Not Time to Retire the Numbers in Wage Gap Discussiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2007:/theblog//3.450812007-04-05T15:45:50-04:002011-05-25T12:05:18-04:00Maria Kefalashttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/maria-kefalas/Op-Ed piece for the Washington Post, author Carrie Lukas takes issue with this figure, not for its inaccuracy but its interpretation.

When interpreting the gender wage-gap, sociologists tend to focus on the institutional obstacles leading to inequality. Ms. Lukas, a researcher at policy think-tank, adopts the thinking of economists who attribute imbalances in earnings to women's distinctive investments in human capital. In such a rational choice perspective, women make "choices" that lead them prioritize family, personal fulfillment and the domestic sphere over the demands of the paid labor force, and in doing so, women diminish their earning power over time.

Such an argument makes perfect sense and Ms. Lukas is absolutely correct. My "college-educated" and "professional" women friends regularly commiserate about how our choices become wage penalties. One friend, a high-powered Washington, DC attorney, is trying to get pregnant. When, and if, she does, she plans to get off the fast-track for a partnership. As a new mom, she simply cannot see herself hiring the two nannies she would need to manage working her typical 80 hours per week. This "choice" means she will not be making partner on-schedule and will not be getting a substantial bump in salary. Another friend, a sports writer, confided to me she missed out on a promotion to columnist and possibly even a lucrative network television gig because of some her "choices." Just as her career was going strong, she cut back on her travel and informed her editor she would only cover football season. With a little girl at home, she explains, she did not relish spending six months of the year in professional athletes' locker rooms.

Clearly, thousands of women make choices that become self-inflicted injuries on their income potential. However, Lukas glosses over the fact that it is only a privileged minority of women who enjoy the power, resources and say-so to determine the structure of how, when and where they work. Women in high-status occupations - corporate attorneys, journalists and college professors - have the autonomy and stature to "get off the fast-track" and try to calibrate a work-family balance. The overwhelming majority of working mothers, with earnings hovering at $20, 000 or $30,000 annually, women with jobs and not careers, encounter a very different reality. Sales clerks cannot telecommute, waitresses do not decide which customers they serve, and it is supervisors, not the factory workers, who figure what days and shifts they get to work.

And, using the language of sociologists, let's get back to some of those sticky structural realities: the obstacles that even professional women with supercharged resumes cannot surmount.

First, what there is no national maternity leave program:

The United States is the only nation in the industrialized world that does not have government mandated and supported programs to provide income and supports for new parents. Currently, employers allow women to leave under disability programs and even these programs offer only the modest level of job protection. Under the existing guidelines, most new mothers return to work far sooner than they would like because they cannot afford to lose the income or they fear their employers would not keep their jobs for an extended period of time.

Second, there is a dearth of affordable childcare. In the United States, the only people who receive subsidized childcare are welfare recipients. And one has to wonder about the logic of the federal government subsidizing child care vouchers -which pay about a minimum wage for marginal child care services at best - so that women can earn the minimum wage in the labor force. Would it not make more sense to permit welfare mothers with babies and toddlers to stay home with their children, and just funnel all the money the government is willing to spend directly to the poorest families. Such a policy might reduce the nation's levels of childhood poverty, which also ranks among the highest for the industrialized countries.

The best research on day-care suggests that it is just fine, if not great, as long at it is high-quality. Unfortunately, high-end day care is expensive and hard to find. For many families, daycare costs - which often rival the mortgage payments on a second home - are so prohibitive that, in a bizarre paradox, many modestly employed and educated mothers with young children find they cannot afford to work.

To my way of thinking, the most troubling feature of this critique on the 77-cents- to-a dollar statistic, and the reason that Ms. Lukas may be very premature in her celebration of women's achievements, is that men still seem to be utterly unburdened by these liberating choices. Where are the men losing sleep at night because they worry taking that latest promotion means being away from the kids or who complain that toiling in the executive suites of the soul-destroying corporate world? Let's make a deal, if the time ever comes when there are books about the latest backlash in the workplace, led by men who are "opting out" of high-powered careers, then, and only then, should we retire the bar charts and stop talking about the numbers.]]>